Despite having only 20% of the world’s shale oil and gas resources, advantages in the US and Canada mean these countries will continue to dominate the market, according to a new Raymond James report. While abundant shale resources exist in several countries around the world, a variety of hurdles preclude their development, including technical know-how, regulatory barriers and environmental issues.

Lebanon has finally opened the bidding for five offshore petroleum blocks in a first licensing round, after a three-year delay brought upon by political instability. Lebanon’s offshore fields are said to hold 96 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 850 million barrels of crude oil.

Once in full operation later this year, the Dudgeon wind farm off the UK coast will have the capacity to provide electricity for more than 400,000 households.

China is the world’s largest solar power country with an installed photovoltaic (PV) capacity of 77.4 gigawatts. Yet despite the Asian country’s huge investment in solar, this capacity generates merely 1% of the country’s electricity.

New energy storage plants in the US are designed to enhance the amount of electricity that can be used on the US power grid. All are producing lithium batteries to store the intermittent electricity from wind and solar farms. Tesla is developing a gigafactory in the state of Nevada to mass produce these batteries and is expected to be operating next year. AES Corp. and Altagas Ltd. are two other companies also creating battery plants in the state of California. The Altagas plant was activated January 27th. AES has another battery plant in Arizona scheduled to go online within the next several months as well as a project in India. The batteries will help reduce the number of blackouts due to power shortages at peak hours and prevent loss of power generated by renewables but not used.

India’s Ministry of New & Renewable Energy announced the country’s operational grid-connected renewable energy capacity surpassed 50 gigawatts. More than half of this renewable capacity comes from wind, followed by solar, hydropower, bioenergy, and waste-to-energy.

A report from Zion Market Research says the Asia-Pacific region is expected to experience the fastest growth of the waste-to-energy market due to improving economic development and rising disposable incomes. Until now Europe has dominated the global waste-to-energy market but this leadership is moving to the East driven primarily by new projects in India, China, and Japan. The global waste to energy market was valued at approximately US$24.0 billion in 2014 and is projected to reach US$36.0 billion by 2020. Waste to energy is a waste treatment process that generates energy in the form of electricity, heat or fuels from both organic and inorganic wastes. Most of the processes produce electricity and heat directly through combustion or produce combustible fuel commodities such as methane, methanol, ethanol, biofuels and biogas. There are a number to technologies used in this process including incineration, gasification, thermal depolymerization, pyrolysis, and plasma arc gasification, anaerobic digestion, fermentation production, and mechanical biological treatment.